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histories by Joachim
Koester
I have decided to title this work "histories". There are
at least two. That of conceptual photography, and that of the places
and events depicted. The histories are evoked through the juxtaposition
of seminal works from the 1960s and 1970s with recent shots from
exactly the same locations.
Take for example the house Ed Ruscha photographed in 1965 as part
of his series "Some Los Angeles Apartments". Right above
the main entrance there is a sign, "Now Renting". In my
photo taken 40 years later a slightly bigger sign says, "Now
Leasing". The house seems to be haunted by vacancy. But the
subtle difference of wording reflects a change in society. Renting
is considered less and less attractive.
Robert Adams's image from Darwin Place in Colorado Springs in 1969
points to time and history as material. Trees have grown up over
thirty-something years, while the house has fallen into decay. A
sediment from the entropic tide that continuously washes the suburbs
further out towards the horizon. In the background is the contour
of a mountain, a time so slow that it falls outside the category
of history. A vast reservoir of years "where remote futures
meet remote pasts".
On September 30, 1967, Robert Smithson paused on his walk through
Passaic, New Jersey to have lunch at the Golden Coach Diner and
reload his instamatic. From the window he had a view of Passaic
center, which Smithson described as a "no center", "a
typical abyss or an ordinary void. What a great place for a gallery!"
The theater and the diner from Smithson's photograph have now been
replaced by a Dunkin' Donuts and a McDonald's drive-thru, emphasizing
the sense of 'void' or non-place.
"In the industrial sector history speeds by, a dragonfly that
lives for one day and undergoes its entire development in this short
period", say Bernd and Hilla Becher. Industrial architecture
becomes obsolete much faster than other architectural structures.
Its future happens at double speed. St. Nicholas Coal Breaker was
the world's biggest in 1931. Today it is a ruin. The industrial
era is already so distant that residents of the small, depressed
towns of Pennsylvania fear they will be left with nothing but the
wooded mountains of coal cinders that engulf rivers and roads everywhere.
There is something ambiguous about the photo, credited to Gordon
Matta-Clark, in Pamela M. Lee's book "Object to Be Destroyed".
For a while I thought it was the subject matter: a stretch of curb
Gordon Matta-Clark bought and documented in 1973. Every time I looked
through the book I startled at the image, wondering what was so
intriguing about this mundane street in Jamaica Queens. Eventually
I went, and something did seem odd. Time was out of joint. Gordon
Matta-Clark's photograph felt less distant than it should have.
Perhaps it was actually taken in the late 1980s. Not that it really
matters. Matta-Clark's Fake Estates is like an instruction piece,
a manual or a recipe to follow. It's about engagement rather than
truth.
In 1971 Thomas Messer, Director of the Guggenheim Museum, stated
that he had to fend off "an alien substance that had entered
the art museum organism". The substance referred to was Hans
Haacke's work "Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,
a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971". Hans Haacke's
exhibition, uncovering real estate speculations, was canceled. Walking
through Lower East Side on a summer day in 2005, I wondered whether
the houses themselves were perhaps the alien substance. Only one
of the low-rent tenement buildings that Haacke documented on 3rd
and 4th street is still standing.
Joachim Koester,
2005
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